ken apart in the process of analysis, the system loses the essential properties deriving from the interaction and effect of the component parts.
Ackoff further distinguishes three types of systems: mechanical, organic and social. Mechanical systems such as those comprising a car or a motorcycle are designed and engineered so that the component parts and their interactions serve the system's purpose: transportation. In an organic system like the human body, the parts are genetically designed to interact and serve the purposes of the system, to maintain the organism as long as possible and provide for reproduction (Maccoby 58-60).
The essence of the general systems theory was expressed as "the whole is more than the sum of its parts". More scientists accepted the idea and the field of general systems research expanded. Parallel to this expansion, there were also contribution in cybernetics, thermodynamics and information theory. Wiener's 1948 book, Cybernetics, the first systematic exposition of the research Wiener, Rosenblueth, and others had been conducting on parallels between communications networks and the human nervous system. Cybernetics takes its title from kybernetes, the Greek term for "steersman," which is also the root for "governor," a term used to describe devices that regulate the performance of machines, like the governor of a steam engine. "Wiener defined information in relation to its opposite: entropy. The second law of thermodynamics holds that the overall level of entropy, or disorder, tends probabilistically to increase in any closed system. Wiener proposed that, like energy, the amount of information, or "negentropy," within a system is subject to a similar process of breaking down and leveling off, also measurable as entropy.
Conversely, the degree of anti-entropic, informational organization in cybernetic systems is regulated through feedback, a continuous cycling of information obtained by artifi...